The first question is why
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Good morning, y'all.
If you are reading this, it is because you signed up to help me test the newsletter delivery company called Sendstack.
Why would I want to change from Mailchimp, which has been my faithful email vendor lo these many years?
There are several reasons:
The big one is privacy. The more we know about big internet companies, the less we want to trust them not to be evil. It makes sense to me that they can't misuse information they do not have. Sendstack does a great job on this page, talking about privacy concerns and email newsletters.
That information is important to you if you make your living selling things, like advertising or your subscriber's information. But because of my members, I don't do that, nor am I tempted. But Mailchimp doesn't give me the option to turn that off. (See how they let me put a paragraph after the bullet point? That's cool!)
Cost is a second one. Mailchimp is expensive for what I use it for. Mailchimp is a marketing platform, not a newsletter publisher. Based on early numbers, I think that Sendstack would cut my techstack bill at least in half.
And the last big one is time. My current process is to write the newsletter, then publish it on the website, so I have an attractive, searchable archive, then copy and paste that into Mailchimp and send. It takes a good 30 minutes of "post-production" every time I publish to make all that happen. However, Sendstack makes an attractive, if minimalistic, archive page similar to the one Substack uses. I don't think it's searchable, but I'm not sure - that's a question I need to be answered. But it appears I can get most of what I do in three current steps in just one. That would be lovely.
Anyway, that's enough for now.
Thanks!
I appreciate your helping me put this through its paces. Poke around and if anything seems weird to you, let me know.
I think that since I have a "free" account, for now, it won't let me send this from my regular email address. So, I'm not sure if I will get replies to this email or not. If the spirit moves you, hit reply and let me know what you think.
Take care,
Hugh